COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW: RASTEK

A brief interview with Rastek, creator of Wither.

Following the repeated interest in the community for developer interviews, I decided to try my hand at it. And who better to interview than the creator of the "Game of the moment," so to speak?

So I contacted Rastek about doing a short interview via PM, and he accepted (rather enthusiastically, I might add!) Questions answers ensued, as shown below.

Solitayre: You can start off by telling us a little about yourself as well, if you like.

Rastek: I'm a nineteen year old art student who types too fast to not make typos. I've been toying with rpgmaker for a while now (on and off since when I was about 13), but all of my proyects have been too ambitious and boring and traditionalist and I ended up abandoning them at different states of completition.

Solitayre: Wither has enjoyed a fair amount of success, especially for an RPG Maker game. How do you feel about the amount of attention your project has received?

Rastek: I'm overjoyed! I really couldn't believe it when my game got featured. To be fair I didn't really expect the reaction to my game to be this good. I was expecting a lot more "ur game is dumb and pretentious and incomprehensible" than what I got (not to say that my game is not all three).

I was kind of hoping to get featured on the indiegames.com blog, which is a subset of Gamasutra, since it's where I heard of Space Funeral, which is what got me to this page, but no luck yet. I'm not really bothered though; that has always only been a pipe dream.

Solitayre: Wither has been called an "artistic" game. What is your reaction to this?

Rastek: Well that was always my intention. I like experimenting with games, since as we are now there's just so much things set in stone, so much things expected of games, that games start incorporating these things even if it doesn't make sense for them to do so.

For example, Kingdom Hearts, as a series, deals with how memories are our identities and shape us to be whoever we are, even if they're fabricated or heavily censored. However, most of the game you spend it whacking little black dudes witha large-ass key. It's like, well, I don't remember where I read it, but some dude described games today as "reading a book that you have to stop after every chapter to do some menial task", and that's not to say traditional game-making can't pull out some jewels (it certainly has), but I just feel like gaming as a medium could do so much more.

Solitayre: What is your general opinion on "art" games?

Rastek: They're pretty good. I've always been a gamer and have always been interested in making games (even if for many years all I did was doodle made-up plattaformer maps
on notebooks) so I got into the indie scene pretty naturally, if only as a spectator. Then one day I played Terry Cavnagh's Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist and I was like "This is it. This is what I want to make."

Solitayre: Was there a reasoning behind the "old-school" gameboy-style graphical style? What was the thought process behind the aesthetic choices?

Rastek: I liked the pallete, so I thought I'd make it gameboy-esque.

Solitayre: What inspired you to want to get into game design?

Rastek: Games, I guess? The idea to make games had always been apealing to me.

Solitayre: What inspired you to want to make such an unusual game like this?

Rastek: I don't really remeber how I got the idea to make the game, all I remeber about was that I was lying in bed trying to sleep when I thought it up. It was based on those pokemon creepypastas that've been going around for a while now, especially this one: http://fyeahpokemoncreepypasta.tumblr.com/post/931752208/pokemon-lost-silver . But there was also a bit of Pokemon Curse Black in there, mostly the last part in which you go around the world as an old man, visiting the tombstones of all the people you killed.

Solitayre: Are there any other sources of inspiration you have?

Rastek: Dreams, other games, everyday life. Sometimes I see something and say "I would've done that differently" so then I start thinking what I would've done differently and sometimes it shapes into a game idea.

Solitayre: Any favorite books, movies, games, or other media?

Rastek: Not really. There are a lot of games/movies/books I've liked a lot, but I can't really say which one I liked the most.

Killer7 maybe. It felt too long at times and too dense and strange at others, but it made me change my perceptions of what a game developer can or can't do.

Solitayre: Are there any games in this community that you particularly enjoy?

Rastek: A couple, all in rpgmaker. But I'm thinking about branching out. I want to learn Unity, but I'm too lazy and I don't really have the time to experiment with it that I had to experiment with RPGmaker back when I was a kid.

Solitayre: Any other comments?

Rastek: Not in particular. English is my second language, so if there's any sentence in there that doesn't really make sense, I'd appreciate you'd email me about it so I can change it before you publish the interview.

Also, thank you for interviewing me! It was fun.

Posts

This was an interesting interview, and I congratulate you for making waves in the larger community. That is quite a feat! Also, I remember reading about how games are like "reading a book, but having to do a crossword before turning the next page", and I remember thinking "that's backwards! It's more like I am doing a crossword and I have to read a shortstory before I get the next clue!". Games are still a very young artform, and likening it to past artforms is imperfect at best, I suppose!

(I also can't believe there was another plug for Asylum of Pleasure & Pain :O)

Your game is so unlike Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist and Asylum of Pleasure and Pain that it's weird that you even mentioned them.

As for Space Funeral, everybody likes Space Funeral and everybody tries to make a game after Space Funeral, but none of those games is anything like Space Funeral (which is definitely not a bad thing).

author=calunioYour game is so unlike Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist and Asylum of Pleasure and Pain that it's weird that you even mentioned them.

As for Space Funeral, everybody likes Space Funeral and everybody tries to make a game after Space Funeral, but none of those games is anything like Space Funeral (which is definitely not a bad thing).

Cool interview! Curious as to what you've been working on.

He mentioned those games as things he liked and didn't connect them to Wither at all.